tales of work, unemployment and those activities in between

Dying for My Personal Email

Things I remembered this morning:
-to make lunch
-to bring the pie I baked for the ladies in my office to the office
-to shower
-to wear office appropriate clothes
-to bring a sweater to my freezing office

Things I did not remember:
-my phone

Therefore, I don’t have my phone. But also, I don’t have my Gmail, because I need my phone to access my account. I am sort of losing my mind. It’s not a crisis, since nobody needs to get in touch with me that badly, and if they do, they can email another account I have.

But honestly, I feel totally cut off from my life. It’s very disorienting. I basically hate it. I can’t even access my Google Reader, which is full of all my favorite things to read.

Sometimes, I dream about the times before the Internet, before cell phones, before phones. What would a day at work be like for someone who had to wait for 6 weeks for a letter from across the Atlantic Ocean? Seriously? What would you do all day? I am really curious about the pace of office work before all this office technology, and particularly before computers, and other communication tools, made the transfer of information instantaneous. What did people do all day? I assume that the answer to that question is “read and write.” The work itself is not so different, it’s the pace that is radically altered by the ability to instantly contact one another, and the ability to edit documents as you go.

On one side of my family, my grandparents owned and worked a farm, but on the other side, both by grandmother and grandfather were educators (I know my grandfather was, though I never knew him). I wonder what he did all day? He probably taught class, then graded papers and prepared assignments, like teachers do now. But how did he research his book? How did he communicate with his publisher? How did he write drafts and edit them? Can you imagine writing a whole book in long-hand? I know Barack Obama did when he wrote Dreams From My Father, but he’s the president of the United States, and I am just me.